Manning accuses US of lying about Iraq
A US soldier imprisoned for leaking documents to WikiLeaks broke her silence in a fiery editorial accusing the United States of lying about Iraq.
Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison in 2013 for leaking 750,000 pages of classified documents to the anti-secrecy group.
But she was back Saturday, with an opinion piece titled 'The Fog Machine of War" in The New York Times. In it, she accuses the US media of looking the other way when chaos and corruption reigned in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"As Iraq erupts in civil war and America again contemplates intervention, that unfinished business should give new urgency to the question of how the United States military controlled the media coverage of its long involvement there and in Afghanistan," Manning wrote.
"I believe that the current limits on press freedom and excessive government secrecy make it impossible for Americans to grasp fully what is happening in the wars we finance."
She said that during the 2010 elections in Iraq, the media duped the world into thinking that all was well.
She said at the time, she got regular reports detailing security forces' crackdown against dissidents "on behalf" of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.
"I was shocked by our military's complicity in the corruption of that election," she said. "Yet these deeply troubling details flew under the American media's radar."
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